Dear White People, Today Is The Day
This is a letter to my fellow white people who are trying to figure out what to do in the face of racism. I’m not an expert. I cannot give you the magic key to say or do the right thing, but I’m a person who wants to do better. Hopefully you are too. I’ll share little bits of what I learn, in hopes that it’s helpful to others.
Some of you also live in the Minneapolis area, it's been surreal, but I think that things need to be torn out by the roots because it's past time for change.
To borrow from a friend: Your black friend is not okay. Just to be clear your black friends feel this way all the time. These stories are not new.
I had a chat with a woman yesterday, also white, who told me a story of how she crossed paths with a stranger. A black woman. The white woman felt terrible, she wanted to express that, and she fell apart crying. She told me of how she and the black woman embraced, comforting each other. The thing is though, that’s not what happened.
What happened was a kind woman, who has to deal with this stuff every day of her life became the focus of a white woman’s grief because the black woman never gets to stop being black. She never gets to take a break from worrying about the safety of the men in her life, or her own. She lives in a world where it’s dangerous not to consider the feelings of white people, to help calm them, it’s exhausting.
This black woman wasn’t feeling comforted, she was cornered into making a white woman feel better. Let’s be clear, our black friends don’t have the emotional energy left over after all they have to deal with to comfort or educate their white friends.
My fellow white people, we need to listen, we need to learn, and we need to refrain from bringing our emotional pain into the conversation because it does a terrible thing. When we lead with our emotions, we (unintentionally) make it about ourselves, and at the end of the day, that’s a form of white supremacy. We must learn to stop putting ourselves at the center.
*typos and other errors provided for your entertainment.
